there are lots of post showing how to get rid of date and featured image in the latest news widget, and cut the length of the excerpt. But how to shorten the length of the title? An ideal solution would be to cut it off at xx characters and add “…” at the end. But just cutting off would do as well.

doesn’t seem to work. Probably my fault – I looked into the page source and realized, that the title got indeed truncated. What I meant is the headline – didn’t know that this is what is displayed. Here’s a link to see what I mean: http://infotropic.ru/?page_id=3288